Hi, new here but been a user of openSUSE for quite a while. I’m going to buy a new laptop and found a great deal for the Dell Vostro 3350 with Intel i5 CPU and AMD/ATi Radeon HD 6470M GPU. The laptop has all the features I’ve been looking for, but before placing an order I would like to hear with you members of this community how it will perform with openSUSE 12.1? As I understand AMD/ATI has not the best support, but maybe it is better in kernel 3.x? How are the proprietory drivers in openSUSE for this hardware?
4a6f616b696d wrote:
>
> Hi, new here but been a user of openSUSE for quite a while. I’m going to
> buy a new laptop and found a great deal for the Dell Vostro 3350 with
> Intel i5 CPU and AMD/ATi Radeon HD 6470M GPU. The laptop has all the
> features I’ve been looking for, but before placing an order I would like
> to hear with you members of this community how it will perform with
> openSUSE 12.1? As I understand AMD/ATI has not the best support, but
> maybe it is better in kernel 3.x? How are the proprietory drivers in
> openSUSE for this hardware?
>
>
I’m owner of Vostro 3450 with i5 and HD6630M. ATM, fglrx doesn’t work at all
(the latest tested version 11.11) - X crashes during start. So for now, I
use intel gpu (with shipped intel driver) and it’s almost fine.
I disabled discret gpu with:
|rmmod radeon
|modprobe radeon
|echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitheroo/switch
added to /etc/init.d/boot.local to minimize power usage. In meantime I’m
waiting for working fglrx.
I tested also this notebook with openSUSE 12.1 and fglrx worked really fine.
openSUSE too 
btw, fingerprint reader doesn’t work yet but webcam out-of-the-box
Pozdrawiam / Greetings,
Mariusz Fik
openSUSE Community Member
openSUSE 12.1 Rocks!
Thanks for the reply! I understand there are some problems with hardware support from reading on other Linux communities, so will lay low for now with the Vostro and check some other laptops as well. Guess Intel and Nvidia has best support for Linux? Fingerpring reader support usually isn’t a problem on Linux, but maybe Vostro have some proprietary driver for that? Guess it’s allot of work to do with checking hardware support before buying a computer that will run Linux on it, so if anyone know a good homepage to find information about supported hardware, I would appreciate the info allot!
I bet hybrid gpu - intel with nvidia - is problematic too…
In the end I decided to stay with Intel hardware and found another great Christmas deal to take part of. Will get the HP ProBook 6560b CI5 2.5GHz instead and think it’s tough enough to last a few years. HP has good support for Linux and after reading the specs PDF from HP official website, they even approve the laptop with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop SP1
Thanks for taking your time to answer my questions.